Josh Freed: How I stopped worrying about weather and learned to love souvlaki

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“The weather tomorrow will be cloudy, or partly cloudy, or mostly cloudy, or cloudy with scattered, condensed showers. It may also be unbearably humid with light drizzle turning to thundershowers, heavy fog, smoke from wildfires, followed by a double rainbow, a supermoon, a solar eclipse and a 200 mm mini-tsunami that floods 100,000 basements.”

Say goodbye to another Montreal schizophrenic summer when the weather forecast usually shows a picture of the sun, hiding behind a dark cloud, pierced by lightning bolts and the tail end of a hurricane.

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But whatever the forecast this summer, it’s usually wrong.

Half the time, there’s a “special” all-day severe storm alert but it ends up sunny. The other half they predict sun all day and then it rains in torrents, almost always on weekends.

I guess extreme climate change makes for extremely unpredictable weather.

However, the good news is that AI robots are now working to help meteorologists, and while they can’t make the weather better (yet), they can forecast it better.

According to news reports, supercomputers have vastly improved their AI skills and can now analyze millions of bits of weather data in less time than we humans can hiccup.

Meteorologists may soon just be staring down at their screens instead of up at the heavens.

Frankly, that already sounds like many guys I know who gaze at their phones’ radar apps more often than at their spouses.

But whatever new forecasting help comes, we need it. This summer, a typical planning chat with my tennis buddies sounds like this:

Friend 1: I see Environment Canada is calling for 9.5 millimetres of rain per hour from 11 to 4 p.m. with an 80 per cent chance of precipitation. Let’s cancel.

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Friend 2: Hold on. The Weather Network predicts only 30 per cent chance of rain, but with a 10 per cent chance of a bomb cyclone.

Friend 3: Hey, I’m looking at AccuWeather and it says sunny all day. Game on!

Humans have never been good at predicting the future, whether for politics, stocks or relationships, but this year’s weather is pretty much anyone’s guess.

Worse, these changing forecasts influence our behaviour. They determine how we dress, whether we go camping or stay home computing, head off to a festival or order in from UberEats.

So I’ve started ignoring the forecast, and going out, whatever they predict, at least until my hair is soaked. Given how few hairs I have that doesn’t happen unless it’s raining pretty hard.

Of course, it would be better if we tried changing our weather, by changing our behaviour. If we all drove less, flew less and consumed less, while companies polluted less, we might stave off the worst elements of climate change.

But most humans don’t dramatically change our behaviour until disaster strikes, whether that takes the melting of the polar ice caps, or Atlantic City becoming part of the Atlantic Ocean.

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So let’s hope AI computers at least get better at telling us when the weather will be worse.

For now I rely on my radar app buddies who have the forecasting certainty of AI, but not the data.

Several weeks ago, I was handed my first free front-row tennis seats to the National Bank Open (Rogers Cup), by a generous friend. But when we got to Jarry Park in late afternoon the match was soon interrupted by rain.

Another buddy with us said he could see the coming rain front clearly on his phone’s radar app, which showed it hovering overhead for quite a while.

He said it would be at least two hours before the rain stopped for good and the game could restart. So we agreed to leave cold, windy and wet Jarry Park for a warm Greek restaurant 10 minutes walk away.

But after trudging there in the drizzle, we found a large queue of tennis refugees standing outside, with the same idea as us.

Fortunately, Radar Guy was live-tracking the storm and said we had at least another 90 minutes before the showers stopped.

So we joined the restaurant queue while he monitored the online clouds. Some 45 minutes later, we were finally seated and had just ordered souvlaki plates when you know what happened: Radar Guy flipped on his phone’s TV app and said: “Omigod! The game is back on NOW!”

So we all started watching together on his tiny phone, rather than in our fabulous front-row seats.

Eventually, I had the idea to get our souvlakis to go, so we jumped up and gobbled them while running back to the stadium, with tzatziki sauce dribbling down our faces.

We arrived back just as the ticket-checker announced our match had ended, so our terrific late-afternoon seats were no longer ours.

Instead, we ended up watching an evening match on a large outdoor TV screen in Jarry Park.

It wasn’t too bad, but I can hardly wait till AI takes over and puts all my radar buddies out of work.

There are some jobs we fallible human beings just shouldn’t be allowed to have.

joshfreed49@gmail.com

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